Friday, August 04, 2006

If you support Israel, you support World War III

(By Chris Moore, LibertarianToday.com) -- Writing for Salon.com, Sydney Blumenthal documents how Bush administration neocons and their apparatchik private-sector allies are trying to use the current Israeli conflict to widen the “war on terror” into World War III:

“Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney's national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.”

Blumenthal says that because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may have qualms about widening the war (“recently she has come under fire from prominent neoconservatives who oppose her support for diplomatic negotiations with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weaponry”) she has come to be seen as a thorn in the side of neocon plans for escalation.

"‘Dump Condi,’ read the headline in the right-wing Insight Magazine on July 25. ‘Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has reversed the administration's national security and foreign policy agenda,’ the article reported.”

Blumenthal continues: “A month earlier, [neocon guru Richard] Perle, in a June 25 Op-Ed in the Washington Post, revived an old trope from the height of the Cold War, accusing those who propose diplomacy of being like Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who tried to appease Hitler…Rice, agent of the nefarious State Department, is supposedly the enemy within.‘We are in the early stages of World War III,’ [Newt] Gingrich told Insight. ‘Our bureaucracies are not responding fast enough. We don't have the right attitude.’”

So now it is clear: first the neocons tried to spark World War III by lying America into a war in Iraq, which because so many neocons are also Jewish nationalists, was to be fought primarily by Americans on behalf of Israel. It didn’t work. Americans don’t want World War III because they know it would have to be conducted against all of Islam, which would be a war that neither side could possibly ever win on any decisive level; much of the world would simply become the new battle ground in a never-ending, Israeli vs. Palestinian style conflict which would accomplish exactly nothing except the devastation of lives, economies and infrastructures.

Because World War III via invasion of Iraq didn’t work, the neocons are trying a second, more direct route--through support of Israel: either America continues to support Israel, and follows wherever that path leads (and the neocons know it will lead to confrontation with Syria and Iran and eventually all of Islam) or it withdraws its support for the Jewish state altogether.

Brinkmanship junkies that they are, the neocons are betting America is dumb enough to continue to support Israel. And because they are also insane, the neocons think the resulting conflict with Islam can be won.

But look at what their previous thinking has wrought their favorite country: year after year of ongoing war--and this despite overwhelming military power by Israel, which has been thrown billions in aid and armaments by dimwitted American politicians and Jewish and Judeo-Christian supporters of Jewish nationalism for decades. If America invades the entire Middle East, it will be the exact same thing on a larger scale, as we have already seen in Iraq--yet another example of the destructive results of neocon ignorance and bigotry.

“Ideas have consequences” used to be a favorite conservative slogan. And it is true, they do. In the case of the neocons, stupid ideas have disastrous consequence, as their warped schemes have proven time and again.

So where are the Democrats on all of this? Like neocon Republicans, still staunch supporters of Israel--which makes them supporters of World War III by default.

As AntiWar.com’s Justin Raimondo writes:“The left-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, which is making political capital out of the Iraqi quagmire, has nothing to say about Israel's Lebanese quagmire – and especially not about our part in subsidizing and egging them on. The Democrats pushed to have Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki barred from speaking to a joint session of Congress because he had dared describe the Israeli invasion of Lebanon as ‘aggression’ – a faux pas in Washington no matter what party you belong to. Congress voted to endorse the murderous Israeli assault, without mentioning any need for restraint or deploring the targeting of civilians and Lebanon's infrastructure: there were only eight dissenting votes.”

The foot-in-both-camps Democrats, just like the hand-wringing Republicans who are too smart to want to conduct World War III, have tried to have it both ways for too long. They want to support Israel, but they don’t really want to wage a global war.

Sorry, but it is simply no longer feasible to have it both ways. Either you are a supporter of Israel, Jewish nationalism and World War III--and all that waging such a war on behalf of Jewish nationalism implies--or you are opposed to Israel, Jewish nationalism and World War III.

If you are in opposition, you must support the immediate suspension of all aid to Israel, military and otherwise, until it reforms its system into a democracy that ensures equal rights under the law for all instead of special rights for Jews over gentiles, which has resulted in its current quasi-fascist incarnation, and a big headache for America. This should be followed by a suspension of aid to all other Middle Eastern countries and regimes that do not meet the same equal rights standards. If this results in the temporary ascension of Islam, so be it. The free markets will deal with Islam in their own way and in their own time. The West may even learn a little something about maintaining higher moral principles from the Muslims in the process.

The alternative is World War III. The Jewish nationalists and their supporters in America won’t have it any other way.